If deplatforming didn't work, why is the CBS 60 Minutes special being pulled? Why does the US have such an elaborate and far reaching network of financial sanctions, and corresponding anti-BDS laws trying to prevent private organizations from maintaining sanctions of their own? Why do most platforms and payment providers deplatform adult content? And so on.
(The article appears to complain that the John Birch Society were wrongly deplatformed, if you want to know how far out the author is)
The thesis of the article would mean that if people are not allowed to express the views in the 60 Minutes story, it would create an opportunity for an ungated, stronger expression of those views in the future.
They literally aren't defending Bircherism ,they say that it would have been more productive to argue against them in public to discredit their ideas rather than letting them fester off in some dark corner. They're talking about how pushing bad ideas out of public view rather than arguing against them can exacerbate negative polarization and draw more people into bad ideas.
You have completely missed the point of the article. So you didn't actually read the article and you're making a dumb claim based on a misunderstanding.
> ,they say that it would have been more productive to argue against them in public to discredit their ideas rather than letting them fester off in some dark corner.
That doesn't work very well either. There are countless examples like the anti-vax nonsense.
I'll agree with the statement that deplatforming doesn't work very well. But it could work better than the alternatives in some cases.
Anti-vaxers were removed from every platform for more than 2 years during the pandemic, and that didn't work. I rarely see anyone actually going into a public forum to try to clearly communicate the evidence for vaccine safety in clear terms rather than just an appeal to authority. Clearly its a hard job, but I think its worthwhile.
> I rarely see anyone actually going into a public forum to try to clearly communicate the evidence for vaccine safety
Then you haven’t looked. There are endless examples of qualified people explaining the actual risks and benefits of vaccines in clear and honest terms.
Perhaps what you actually mean is that you don’t see this happen within the insular communities that embrace antivaccine rhetoric. You don’t see it there because such efforts are blocked. Go explain vaccines in an antivax subreddit and watch as you get downvoted into invisibility and probably banned from the sub.
So you still didn't read the article and you're changing the subject to cover for the fact that you made up that the article defends bircherism. Nice attempt at a deflection, but you're still reacting to something you didn't read based on basically just the headline.
The point isn’t to de-platform to silence anyone; it’s to avoid legal and public scrutiny for the companies who were hosting them.
Let’s face it: those in the political sphere are disingenuous at best and outright liars at worst. Just because these politicians and political pundits were spouting ridiculous shit that are protected by their first amendment right, no company has to allow them to do so and expose them to the legal and political fallout from their commentary.
If some other company wants to shoulder that, woohoo for them.
What I'm saying is that this is a survivor effect: there are plenty of cases where deplatforming does work, it's just not 100% effective and so we have this situation like antibiotic resistance where pathologies have evolved around the defenses. It's kind of incredible that viruses have managed to evolve around vaccines to install a pro-virus person at the top of the US department of health to ensure better spread of viruses, but I guess life finds a way.
Also: this is entirely anglocentric. I don't think you'd find anyone claiming that the Chinese government censorship system backfired or is completely ineffective. It's an even stronger system than billionaires over there.
If anything, the federal government became even more aggressive in it's censorship efforts under the current administration. Banning individual words in federal reports and grantees publications, pressuring networks to fire program hosts, performatively lawsuits, threatening to pull broadcast licenses and now even censoring an individual CBS story. Things have distinctly escalated.
This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. Who knows what would have happened if Trump's twitter account hadn't been banned? Also, it seems a bit off to describe Musk's leadership of Twitter as triggering the return of "the free and open internet".
> This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual.
I think it's just evaluating the claim that removing these people from a public platform removes their ideas from popular discourse, which obviously didn't work. The article is arguing that failing to engage bad ideas head on leads to increasingly insular an polarized groups within society.
Agreed. The internet is a wild ride of walled garden algorithms, dead internet theory, bot comments with other bot comments, like farming, influenced sway-the-masses, scam laden AI generated nightmares with major platforms requiring IDs, biometric verifications where you're fingerprinted, scanned, identified and crapped on.
Deplatforming removes a voice to a captive audience where one has entire lively hoods taken from them, their viewpoints suppressed and are forced to other platforms where the userbases are questionable offering their own infinite scrolls and dopamine hits and their own cancel cultures.
Funny, the Musk comment tripped me up as well. Since it is clear the Twitter algos and Grok are sycophantic.
Yet … the article resonates with me. Deplatforming. Canceling. Suppressing. Has not worked.
Moderation. Healthily engagement. Acknowledgement but not acceptance. Can that work?
It resonates with people who aren’t personally affected by the Overton window shifting towards extremism. It’s now more normal to fling racist slurs at people online, and that behaviour is coming offline as well. When we used to “deplatform” racism this sort of talk wasn’t within the Overton window. Of course if you’re not personally affected you’ll say this is fine, marketplace of ideas etc. Let the marketplace sort out if racism should be normalised or not.
It doesn’t even lead to better discourse. We’re both here, commenting on this forum right? It’s because the level of discourse here is higher than elsewhere, certainly much better than “free speech” platforms like Musk’s. How can that be, when HN has extraordinarily strict rules on acceptable speech? Even calling someone an idiot can get you banned here, let alone a pajeet or Paki. If you truly believed in freedom of speech, you’d quit a forum moderated like this.
It’s frustrating that this is flagged. I don’t agree with the article but I think there’s good context here for actual discussion.
If deplatforming didn't work, why is the CBS 60 Minutes special being pulled? Why does the US have such an elaborate and far reaching network of financial sanctions, and corresponding anti-BDS laws trying to prevent private organizations from maintaining sanctions of their own? Why do most platforms and payment providers deplatform adult content? And so on.
(The article appears to complain that the John Birch Society were wrongly deplatformed, if you want to know how far out the author is)
The thesis of the article would mean that if people are not allowed to express the views in the 60 Minutes story, it would create an opportunity for an ungated, stronger expression of those views in the future.
Did you read the article or are you responding to the headline?
I read it enough to get to the defense of Bircherism.
They literally aren't defending Bircherism ,they say that it would have been more productive to argue against them in public to discredit their ideas rather than letting them fester off in some dark corner. They're talking about how pushing bad ideas out of public view rather than arguing against them can exacerbate negative polarization and draw more people into bad ideas.
You have completely missed the point of the article. So you didn't actually read the article and you're making a dumb claim based on a misunderstanding.
> ,they say that it would have been more productive to argue against them in public to discredit their ideas rather than letting them fester off in some dark corner.
That doesn't work very well either. There are countless examples like the anti-vax nonsense.
I'll agree with the statement that deplatforming doesn't work very well. But it could work better than the alternatives in some cases.
Anti-vaxers were removed from every platform for more than 2 years during the pandemic, and that didn't work. I rarely see anyone actually going into a public forum to try to clearly communicate the evidence for vaccine safety in clear terms rather than just an appeal to authority. Clearly its a hard job, but I think its worthwhile.
It's an impossible job. It takes many hours of work to properly debunk a post that can be written in 30 seconds. Even less if you use a bot.
> I rarely see anyone actually going into a public forum to try to clearly communicate the evidence for vaccine safety
Then you haven’t looked. There are endless examples of qualified people explaining the actual risks and benefits of vaccines in clear and honest terms.
Perhaps what you actually mean is that you don’t see this happen within the insular communities that embrace antivaccine rhetoric. You don’t see it there because such efforts are blocked. Go explain vaccines in an antivax subreddit and watch as you get downvoted into invisibility and probably banned from the sub.
Why do I never hear the "it would be better to let pornography onto major platforms so people could debate against it in the comments" argument?
So you still didn't read the article and you're changing the subject to cover for the fact that you made up that the article defends bircherism. Nice attempt at a deflection, but you're still reacting to something you didn't read based on basically just the headline.
He didn’t say the article is correct. He said that arguing against the article without reading it is dumb.
Removing Trump from Twitter didn't stop people from voting him.
Removing 60 Minutes from CBS doesn't stop people like you from on elsewhere.
Instead, it fuel them to post elsewhere.
Deplatforming didn't work, and deplatforming doesn't work now.
The point isn’t to de-platform to silence anyone; it’s to avoid legal and public scrutiny for the companies who were hosting them.
Let’s face it: those in the political sphere are disingenuous at best and outright liars at worst. Just because these politicians and political pundits were spouting ridiculous shit that are protected by their first amendment right, no company has to allow them to do so and expose them to the legal and political fallout from their commentary.
If some other company wants to shoulder that, woohoo for them.
What I'm saying is that this is a survivor effect: there are plenty of cases where deplatforming does work, it's just not 100% effective and so we have this situation like antibiotic resistance where pathologies have evolved around the defenses. It's kind of incredible that viruses have managed to evolve around vaccines to install a pro-virus person at the top of the US department of health to ensure better spread of viruses, but I guess life finds a way.
Also: this is entirely anglocentric. I don't think you'd find anyone claiming that the Chinese government censorship system backfired or is completely ineffective. It's an even stronger system than billionaires over there.
If anything, the federal government became even more aggressive in it's censorship efforts under the current administration. Banning individual words in federal reports and grantees publications, pressuring networks to fire program hosts, performatively lawsuits, threatening to pull broadcast licenses and now even censoring an individual CBS story. Things have distinctly escalated.
It doesn't seem like its working very well for them, and if anything polarize people further as the article suggests.
Sounds like deplatforming is a variant of the Streisand effect.
This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual. Who knows what would have happened if Trump's twitter account hadn't been banned? Also, it seems a bit off to describe Musk's leadership of Twitter as triggering the return of "the free and open internet".
> This article is predicated on an unfounded counterfactual.
I think it's just evaluating the claim that removing these people from a public platform removes their ideas from popular discourse, which obviously didn't work. The article is arguing that failing to engage bad ideas head on leads to increasingly insular an polarized groups within society.
Agreed. The internet is a wild ride of walled garden algorithms, dead internet theory, bot comments with other bot comments, like farming, influenced sway-the-masses, scam laden AI generated nightmares with major platforms requiring IDs, biometric verifications where you're fingerprinted, scanned, identified and crapped on.
Deplatforming removes a voice to a captive audience where one has entire lively hoods taken from them, their viewpoints suppressed and are forced to other platforms where the userbases are questionable offering their own infinite scrolls and dopamine hits and their own cancel cultures.
It is what it is.
Funny, the Musk comment tripped me up as well. Since it is clear the Twitter algos and Grok are sycophantic. Yet … the article resonates with me. Deplatforming. Canceling. Suppressing. Has not worked. Moderation. Healthily engagement. Acknowledgement but not acceptance. Can that work?
It resonates with people who aren’t personally affected by the Overton window shifting towards extremism. It’s now more normal to fling racist slurs at people online, and that behaviour is coming offline as well. When we used to “deplatform” racism this sort of talk wasn’t within the Overton window. Of course if you’re not personally affected you’ll say this is fine, marketplace of ideas etc. Let the marketplace sort out if racism should be normalised or not.
It doesn’t even lead to better discourse. We’re both here, commenting on this forum right? It’s because the level of discourse here is higher than elsewhere, certainly much better than “free speech” platforms like Musk’s. How can that be, when HN has extraordinarily strict rules on acceptable speech? Even calling someone an idiot can get you banned here, let alone a pajeet or Paki. If you truly believed in freedom of speech, you’d quit a forum moderated like this.